Mo Bamba got his minutes, Minnesota got 10 offensive rebounds instead of its usual 15, and the Wolves threw it away 22 times. That's everything our preview asked for. Darryn Peterson scored a career-high 26 on top of it, and we lost by 15 anyway. The Jazz were plus-3 in Peterson's 35 minutes and minus-18 in the 12:46 he sat. We lost Sunday's game in those 13 minutes, and right now Will Hardy has nobody to play in them.
Grading the preview
The question was whether Hardy would play Bamba after benching him in Dallas, and what that would do to the best offensive rebounding team in the league. He played 17:05. Minnesota came in averaging 15.0 offensive rebounds and finished with 10, to our 11. By our count of the play-by-play, the Wolves got four with Bamba on the floor and five in Jaxson Hayes's 29 minutes, so Hayes gets his share of the credit, along with an 18-point night on 6-of-6 shooting. The glass held, mostly. Minnesota still had 16 second-chance points to our 11 on NBA.com's box. By our count of the play-by-play, the Wolves also kept the ball four more times after a missed shot on team rebounds, with no player credited.
The pick was Timberwolves 116, Jazz 104. It finished 115-100: right winner, three points light on the margin. Call it a B. We take an F on the turnovers, where we said the ball would beat us. Minnesota turned it over 22 times, we did 14 times (one of them a team turnover), and we won points off turnovers 25-19. Ace Bailey had four of our 10 steals.
So we won on the offensive glass, with the ball and in the paint (54-50), and Bamba was a minus-17 anyway. Minnesota beat us from three (12-of-32 to our 7-of-24) and at the line (27-of-32 to our 19-of-24). That's 23 points, more than the margin, and 13 of them came in the 13 minutes Peterson sat, when Minnesota made four threes and we made none.
Four stretches on the bench
Peterson sat four times, and the last one, the final 1:44, came with the game already gone. He went out with 4:45 left in the first quarter and us up 17-12. When he came back at 2:15, we were down 20-23. He sat to start the second at 25-28 and came back at 6:29 down 33-43. And with 3:01 left in the third, after his step-back three made it 70-74, Hardy took him out at a timeout. The quarter ended 78-90. Trey Lyles went to the line for three right after the change, Bones Hyland scored six, and Minnesota went 7-of-8 on free throws before the buzzer.
Those first three stints add up to about 11 minutes, and Minnesota won them by more than 20. With him on the floor, we outscored a team that's now 8-3.
The start of the fourth cuts against that, and the Associated Press game story points right at it: Utah opened the quarter 0-for-9 from the floor and went almost four minutes without a point. Peterson was out there for all of it. So was Brice Sensabaugh, who took six of those nine shots. The lead went from 12 to 18 before Hayes made two free throws with 8:03 left. Chandler Holt of KSL had it right on X later in the quarter: "The Jazz need, need, need Brice Sensabaugh (or anyone not named Darryn Peterson) to contribute offensively right now." Even Peterson's minutes go sour when the bench guys next to him can't make a shot.
Hardy saw the same game we did, at least on Peterson. "I thought Darryn turned in his best game as a pro," he said after the game, per Eric Spyropoulos's Jazz.com takeaways. "There's a variety of ways to attack. There's a lot to take away from how he not only handled ball pressure, but also an elite big at the rim."
That big was Rudy Gobert, who had 15 rebounds, and Peterson's answer to him was the floater. By our count of NBA.com's shot distances, only three of his 21 shots came within five feet of the rim. The play-by-play calls seven of them floaters, and he made four (from 6, 11, 11 and 15 feet), plus 4-of-8 from three (a career high in threes, per Jazz.com). A few fans on X spent Sunday night saying he doesn't get to the rim enough. Against Gobert, the floater was the right shot, and he made enough of them. He went 11-of-21 with six rebounds and four assists, two nights after setting his old career high of 21 in Dallas.
All those floaters cost him one thing: he didn't shoot a free throw. Kyler Fox of Roundtable counted that in Peterson's favor, 26 points without needing the line. SLC Dunk's recap read it the other way, as a sign "there is still plenty of room to grow." We're with SLC Dunk: we lost the free-throw line by eight points, and the guy who had the ball most never got there.
The bench, again
Our bench scored 20 on 9-of-32. Minnesota's scored 35, and Hyland had 14 of them in 13 minutes. Sensabaugh went 1-of-10, Svi Mykhailiuk 0-of-2, and Josh Okogie 0-of-3 with a minus-19, the worst on the team. Isaiah Collier was minus-14 in 16 minutes. The one bench guy who gave us something was Kyle Filipowski: nine points, six rebounds and the three that put us ahead 25-23 late in the first. "I thought Kyle played like Kyle," Hardy said, per Jazz.com.
"The bench sucks and we have a bunch of injuries," one fan wrote in the r/UtahJazz postgame thread. With Lauri Markkanen (right wrist), Jaren Jackson Jr. and Jusuf Nurkić out, the second unit has nobody a defense has to move for. Hardy called it "tons of positives but we don't get the result to show for it." Nearly all of those positives came from the starters.
Minnesota also lived at the free-throw line, and Hardy put that on us. "They got away from us at the free-throw line," he said. "We didn't do a great job of keeping our body positioning in front, and they played through our hip and put us in positions where we had to foul." Minnesota went 11-of-12 at the line in the third quarter alone, and this is a team that came in shooting .648 from the line, the worst mark in the league, as the AP pointed out. Jazz.com also pointed to Minnesota's 50 points in the paint, but we scored 54 there. Ayo Dosunmu went 8-of-8 from the line on his way to 26 and hit 4-of-5 from three. LaMelo Ball had 24.
Now without Keyonte
Keyonte George was listed questionable with an illness Sunday morning and cleared to play before tip, per NBC Sports. He gave us 19 points, eight assists and 9-of-10 at the line. Early in the fourth he "rolled his ankle while running up the floor after a Timberwolves basket," Jazz.com wrote. The basket was a Dosunmu layup, and George didn't return. He left with us down 78-93 and 9:12 to play. Peterson scored six of our next 12 points, and the closest we got was 10, at 88-98 with 5:53 left.
The NBA's official injury report from Tuesday morning has George out against Miami with a right ankle sprain, and Markkanen questionable with the wrist. ESPN's injury list, as we read it Monday evening, estimates George back on Nov. 11, the day after Miami.
So here's where the Jazz are: 1-9, eight straight losses, 15th in the West, and tied with Sacramento and Milwaukee for the worst record in the NBA. "DP is very good at playing basketball," another fan wrote in the same thread, and ten games in he's the best thing this team has going. Without George, he'll carry even more of it, and the bench minutes get even harder to fill. Hardy can't play him 48 minutes, so the job this week is finding a group that can survive the 13 he sits.
Miami is next, Tuesday at 7 p.m. MT at the Delta Center on KJZZ (schedule).
Take note.
Sources: NBA.com box score (every player line, minutes, plus-minus, shooting and free throws, both benches' points, team turnovers, offensive rebounds, second-chance points, points off turnovers and points in the paint) and NBA.com play-by-play (Peterson's four stints on the bench and the score at each change, the margin in the first three, Minnesota's offensive rebounds with Bamba and with Hayes on the floor, Minnesota's team rebounds after missed shots, Peterson's shot distances and floaters, the free throws by quarter, the fourth quarter's first nine shots and first points, the Dosunmu layup before George's exit and the score after it, all our count); NBA.com standings and schedule for the records, conference and league place, losing streak and next game; the NBA official injury report, 9:45 a.m. ET Nov. 10, for George's and Markkanen's status against Miami and George's right ankle sprain; ESPN's Jazz injury list, read at 6 p.m. MT Nov. 9, for George's estimated return; NBC Sports for George's illness and his status before the game; Eric Spyropoulos, Jazz.com, for Will Hardy's quotes, the line on how George got hurt, Minnesota's paint points and Peterson's career high in threes; the Associated Press game story, via the Deseret News, for the 0-for-9 start to the fourth and Minnesota's league-worst free-throw percentage; Chandler Holt, KSL, on X; Kyler Fox, Roundtable, and gabebodily, SLC Dunk on Peterson's free throws; our Mavericks recap for Peterson's previous career high; the r/UtahJazz postgame thread for both fan lines; our preview for the question, the pick and Minnesota's offensive rebounding average.